University of South Australia > UniSA Business School > Research strengths > Centre for Workplace Excellence > Our research > Project summaries

Current projects




RECEIVE THE ASK

Flexible work arrangements: Upskilling organisations and leaders

 

Strategies to improve Manager-Employee negotiations

This is an opportunity to enhance your managerial skills by learning:

  • How to respond and negotiate customised work arrangements with your team members while coming across as both fair and flexible
  • How to attract and retain women, mature-age workers and other employees with diverse needs, balancing employee well-being and organisational productivity criteria
  • How to shape and bend policy use as opposed to rigid and narrow application of workplace policies
  • How to influence sideways, upwards and downwards – which is required in stakeholder management and essential to improving policy design and use  
  • For more information please contact us by clicking HERE


This workshop is suitable for managers at every level including those who work for government and not-for-profit agencies.

 

For more information please contact us by clicking HERE

WORKFORCE ANALYTICS

Making numbers work for you 

 

People drive performance

Modern organisations collect large amounts of data about their most important resource - people. Many times the information is stored in incompatible systems, or in the wrong format, making it hard to access. Therefore, organisations struggle to use the HR data to make sound, evidence based decisions.

CWeX can help your HR team. We have expertise in people issues and research / data skills to:

  • Leverage your existing data to best match the key HR concepts
  • Identify trends and patterns to support decision making
  • Make recommendations to collect better data

 

Using robust data analysis tools, we can support your decision making. We can identify patterns and time trends related to:

  • Employee turnover
  • Managerial competencies
  • Performance trajectories, and much more...   
  • For more information please contact us by clicking HERE
  • We offer a strategic HR perspective, working with your team to identify sources of high-quality data to explore big-picture HR patterns.

LEADING FOR CHANGE

Making your people more productive, collaborative and happier at work

 

Developing your leadership capabilities to cope with upcoming challenges

In Australia, 94% of managers believe that leadership is important for their organisational success, but only 8% strongly believe that Australia encourages the development of great leaders. Leaders are usually trained for the past, not for the future.

Our experts provide "evidence-based" recommendations for current and prospective organisational leaders by:

  • Producing creative and meaningful research based on academic/organisational partnerships
  • Providing leadership workshops and academic experience for managers to promote their leadership skills and career success 
  • Achieving organisational collaborations and partnerships that build leadership capabilities, innovation, change, and organisational effectiveness

 

By integrating theory and practice, CWeX can assist organisations to enhance their leadership development programs, including:

  • Coaching and mentoring
  • Employee engagement surveys
  • Team development and effectiveness
  • Strategic planning, design, and implementation
  • Leader and employee wellbeing

For more information, please contact us by clicking HERE

HOW TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE FOR A CHANGE

Changing Contexts: Impacts on Organisations, Teams, Employees and Clients

Aim

To examine how organisations, teams and individuals should adapt to remain competitive in today’s global marketplace.

About the project

It’s often said that change is the only constant in life. But there is another: the inability of organisations to cope with it. Indeed, global surveys reveal that about 70% of change initiatives fail. And that includes even the most advanced, large-scale change models because human resource management practices and the impact of the social context are usually not adequately considered. more...

Context is everything. Current changes in human resource management practices, the composition of teams and the pressures of the daily work environment will be investigated in this three-year project funded by an Australian Research Council grant.

Changes in context be examined at multiple levels to determine how they impacts an organisation’s processes and effectiveness, the adaptability and performance of teams, the wellbeing and performance of its employees, and, ultimately, client service.

The findings can help organisations, managers and employees understand the process and implications of various workplace changes better, enabling them to manage change to produce more positive outcomes.

Contributors

Chief investigator: Professor Cheri Ostroff.

RISKY BUSINESS

A Big Data-Theoretic Approach to Quantify Organisational Failure Mechanisms in Probabilistic Risk Assessment

Aim

To build social and organisational factors into models of technological system risk in order to better be able to prevent accidents and failures

About the project

What caused the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the deaths of the Columbia and Challenger space shuttle crews, the fatal Bhopal gas leak and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? It is now widely recognised that the culture, climate and leadership of the organisations contributed significantly to these disasters. The social system failed before the hardware did. more...

It is therefore critical to be able to detect such weaknesses in an organisation in order to prevent catastrophic accidents and maintain public health and safety.

Engineers routinely use probabilistic risk assessment to assess the likelihood of something going wrong with complex engineering, such as an airliner or a nuclear power plant. Traditionally, these models have focused on equipment problems and human error. In this five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation, we will dig further into the underlying problems in an organisation’s safety culture, collaboration mechanisms, training systems and performance management and integrate them into probabilistic risk models.

Contributors

Chief investigators: Professor Cheri Ostroff with Dr Zahra Mohaghegh from the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering, and Associate Professor Catherine Blake with joint appointments in the Departments of Computer Science and Medical Information Science (both from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign).

COMPASSION FATIGUE

The causes, form and remediation of compassion fatigue of personal care workers in aged care

Aim

To understand how compassion fatigue (CF) emerges among personal care workers in residential aged care, the ways that it is experienced, and to  identify potential ways of preventing, avoiding, minimising it, and remedying it once it exists.

Summary of the project

Compassion fatigue – the loss of empathy by care givers – is a feature of the caring professions. However, the way that it emerges and is experienced, varies substantially between occupational groups. This study will interview personal care workers in aged care to better understand how these employees experience CF, develop CF, the forms that it takes, and the various organisational and personal ways that it can be resolved.

Contributors

Dr Gerry Treuren (Chief Investigator)

Dr Claire Hutchinson

Dr Danica Liu

Dr Ashlea Bartram